Defense TVPO leader visits Fort Hood

FORT HOOD, Texas -- Dr. Susan Kelly, director of the Transition to Veterans Program Office, visited Fort Hood March 24-27 to gain an understanding of Fort Hood's Soldier For Life -- Transition Assistance Program.

TVPO prepares service members for a successful and easy transition to civilian life, and Kelly has been active in revitalizing the Defense Department's TAP, with the goal of ensuring that service members who are separating from active duty are given the tools and information they need to pursue their civilian career goals. She is also the co-chair of the TAP Senior Steering Group, and she has direct contact and collaboration with leaders across the DoD, Veterans Affairs, Labor, Education, Office of Personnel Management and the Small Business Administration.

Kelly visited the installation to see how successful Fort Hood is in pushing Soldiers through the transition process, where each and every Soldier is still receiving the right training, tools and information needed to slide into civilian life effectively and efficiently.

Arriving at Fort Hood on the night of March 24, Kelly spent all day March 25 and 26 gaining a big-picture view of Fort Hood's active and reserve components before heading back to Washington, D.C., March 27.

Her visit to Fort Hood included a packed itinerary of what makes the Great Place great. March 25 began with an introduction to the installation where Kelly went through briefings with the Fort Hood garrison command team about what Fort Hood does, how Fort Hood fits into the local community and some of the numbers -- as far as the combat power, Soldiers and Families -- to equate those numbers to Fort Hood and the Central Texas region, specifically. She then went to the SFL-TAP offices to gain an overview of what Fort Hood's Directorate of Human Resources does, and the mobilization and demobilization for reserve components here.

In the afternoon, Kelly toured the Fort Hood Education Center and spoke with a couple of different classes of transitioning Soldiers. She began with an executive Veterans Opportunity to Work TAP class, geared toward sergeants major/lieutenant colonels and above, and moved on to a junior enlisted class, collecting feedback from the separating Soldiers about TAP programs.

"Is there anything I don't know, that I need to know to take back to Washington with me?" Kelly asked them.

She encouraged the classes to keep striving for the best, and she made it clear that TAP wants to help them succeed.

"You all aren't built to leave your active-duty careers and go home and sit on the couch; you are the less than 1 percent of this nation, you'll keep contributing to our nation because you're built for it," Kelly said. "We need you."

She took questions at the end of each class and led discussions about several topics within the SLF-TAP programs, from the Post 9/11 GI Bill and starting a small business, to anonymous instructor evaluations.

"Make sure to utilize the online resources," she said. "Use your instructors, use the resources, and give us feedback on what can be better."

After visiting with the classes at the education center, Kelly's visit continued on to tour the career skills programs -- Veterans in Piping, General Motors's Shifting Gears and the Microsoft Software and Systems Analysis programs.

"(March 26) we spent on the reserve side of the house," Martin Traylor, Fort Hood Transition Services manager for SFL-TAP explained, after a packed day of active-duty information. "We took her to North Fort Hood and showed her how a reserve unit coming back from (a deployment) returns to Fort Hood and goes through the demobilization process … and all of the transition training they go through to prepare them to get a job, if they don't already have one, going home.

"She really saw 360 degrees of Fort Hood," he said.

Kelly said she was impressed by the quality of Fort Hood's TAP. She told the Fort Hood garrison commander that she couldn't get over how Fort Hood runs their Capstone classes.

"Capstone is the final event in TAP. … We're running four Capstone events with 20 clients, and we do it every single day, five days a week," Traylor explained, "and she was impressed with how we can push that volume through -- almost 100 people per day -- and still have the same one-on-one personal touch with over 10,000 Soldiers a year."

Kelly's in-person visit to Fort Hood for a look at the TAP program here was important, Traylor said.

"She's handling Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the Coast Guard," he said. "The perspective of the services is so different. Army does transition entirely different from how the Navy does it, how the Marine Corps does it -- you have to really see each one individually.

"But," Traylor continued, "even within the Army, programs at other installations don't push the volume that Fort Hood is pushing. For her to come here and look at an Army program tailored to the amount of people we have, … this is the only place, the only installation in all of the DoD with a program like ours. There is nothing like it; nowhere else she could go to gain this perspective. The challenges at Fort Hood are unique to Fort Hood."

With National Guard, active and Reserve components, Traylor and the Fort Hood SLF-TAP team touch nearly 20,000 transitioning Soldiers yearly, an amount that was shown to Kelly on her visit, furthering her satisfaction with Fort Hood's effort.

Kelly left Fort Hood's Soldiers with words of encouragement on their journeys transitioning to civilian life before heading back to D.C. Friday morning.

"The leadership skills you have gained, the values and morals you live by, those are things this country needs and will continue to need," she said. "Every single community in the nation needs your leadership.

"There is a void of leadership in our communities; we need people with integrity, values -- the very same things that have been bred into you as Soldiers," she concluded. "Please, we ask you to keep using those skills, keep leading in this country."

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